Saint Ignatius of Antioch
552 West End Ave
New York
United States
7:00 p.m.
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Corónica. (Image: Roey Yoahi Studios)
An Empire of Silver and Gold
Daniel Zuluaga leads Corónica, a collective of musicians from Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Argentina, and the US, in a program of vocal and instrumental pieces from 18th-century Latin America.
7:00 p.m.
Saint Ignatius of Antioch
552 West End Ave
New York
United States
Share
Overview
Our online registration is now CLOSED for this event, but tickets are still available through the Five Boroughs Music Festival website (the Non-Member Registration tab) and at the door.
Admission: FREE for AS and YPA Members, and all students with ID; $40 VIP Priority seating, $25 General Admission, $15 seniors. All non-member ticketing will be handled by the Five Boroughs Music Festival.
Not yet a member? Learn how to become an Americas Society member to access this event.
Daniel Zuluaga leads Corónica, a collective of musicians from Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Argentina and the US, in a program he created of vocal and instrumental pieces from 18th-century Latin American manuscript sources, including works by Juan de Araujo, Andrés Flores, Joseph de Torres, and Juan Franzés Yribarren. The idea of an empire full of gold, silver, and other treasures was one of the most powerful fantasies that the New World imprinted upon the imagination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European conquerors and explorers. As vast material and human riches were plundered, colonizers also planted some precious and perhaps unintended seeds. The one that may have flourished most vigorously was music, which was an effective tool for evangelizing the indigenous and African slave populations. The wonders of polyphony and the teaching of music bore fruits in Colonial Latin America that were nothing short of extraordinary. The geographic immensity of this region, from what is today the Southern United States to Patagonia, offered the most fertile soil for such fruit. The program "An Empire of Silver and Gold," deemed by the San Diego Union Tribune as a “treasure with its own shimmer and gleam,” is built around works selected, edited, and reconstructed by Zuluaga from some of the most important musical archives in the Americas—from cathedrals in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, among others—woven together to provide an informal overview, a snapshot, of the wonders of music in Colonial Latin America.
Program:
- Anon /ANTONIO MARTÍN Y COLL (1650 – 1734): Chacona
- JUAN DE ARAUJO (1646 – 1712): ¡Ay, andar a tocar, a cantar, a baylar!
- Anon./Codex Martínez Compañón, ca. 1785: A la mar me llevan
- Anon./ANTONIO MARTÍN Y COLL Los impossibles
- Anon./Bogotá, ca. 1700 Quando muere el sol
- SANTIAGO DE MURCIA (1673 – 1739) Los ymposibles por la D
- JOSEPH DE TORRES (ca. 1670 – 1738) Lágrimas tristes, corred
- Anon./ANTONIO MARTÍN Y COLL Xácara
- JUAN FRANZÉS YRIBARREN (1699 – 1767) Xácara de fandanguillo
- Anon./Quito, ca. 1700 Atención a la fragua amorosa
- JOAN CABANILLES (1644 – 1712) Tiento de falsas primer tono
- TOMÁS DE TORREJÓN Y VELASCO (1644 – 1728) Quando el bien que adoro
- SANTIAGO DE MURCIA Zarambeques por la C
- MANUEL BLASCO (ca. 1628 – ca. 1696) La chacona me piden, ¡vaya!
- Anon./Codex Martínez Compañón Ynfelizes ojos míos
- Anon./Codex Martínez Compañón Lanchas para baylar
- Anon./Cuzco, 1753 Pasacualiyo
- SANTIAGO DE MURCIA Marizápalos
- JOSEPH DE SAN JUAN (d. 1747) Una noche que los Reyes
- ANDRÉS FLORES (1690 – 1754) A este edificio célebre
Ensemble
Nell Snaidas, Jennifer Ellis Kampani - sopranos
Solange Merdinian - mezzo-soprano
Joel González Estrada - tenor
Adrian Rosas - bass-baritone
Priscilla Herreid - baroque oboe, recorders
Aisslinn Nosky, Karina Schmitz - baroque violins
Katie Rietman - baroque cello
Daniel Zuluaga, Simon Martyn-Ellis - baroque guitars
Heather Miller Lardin - violone
Grant Herreid - baroque guitar, theorbo
Rex Benincasa - percussionThis concert is part of GEMAS, a project of Americas Society and Gotham Early Music Scene devoted to early music of the Americas.
About the artists
Two-time Juno-award nominee (Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences), Colombian lutenist and guitarist Daniel Zuluaga has been praised for his “rhythmic vitality and fine sense of color” (Washington Post), and for his “great inventiveness” as an accompanist (San Francisco Classical Voice). Based in Montréal, he performs regularly with leading orchestras in Canada and the United States, including Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Les Violons du Roy, L’Harmonie des Saisons, San Diego Bach Collegium, Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, and Ensemble Caprice. An avid researcher, Zuluaga has published articles on the early history of the guitar and has won awards for musicological studies, including a Fulbright fellowship. Zuluaga is visiting faculty at the Universidad Central in Bogotá, Colombia, and holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Southern California (2014). He is currently preparing a Baroque guitar recording on the music of Henry François de Gallot.
The ensemble Corónica was born out of a deep interest in historical portraits woven into narrative storytelling, and the desire for a conversation about the complex historical realities and the beauty of music in Colonial Latin America. A collective of musicians from Canada, Colombia, Cuba, and the US, the ensemble takes its name from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s 1615 massive chronicle entitled El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno, a testimony of events past and guide to social fairness in the viceroyalty of Peru. The glowing reviews of the ensemble’s premiere performances, as a project sponsored by the Bach Collegium San Diego, praised the ensemble’s joyous, ebullient, and infectious approach, and its ability to achieve “something difficult and rare: transparency without thinness and a substantive sonic presence [...] without obscuring individual lines.” (San Diego Union Tribune)
In collaboration with:
Program Notes
The idea of an empire full of gold, silver, and other treasures was one of the most powerful fantasies that the New World imprinted upon the imagination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European conquerors and explorers. As vast material and human riches were plundered, colonizers also planted some precious and perhaps unintended seeds. The one that may have flourished most vigorously was music, which was an effective tool for evangelizing the indigenous and African slave populations. The wonders of polyphony and the teaching of music bore fruits in Colonial Latin America that were nothing short of extraordinary. The geographic immensity of this region, from what is today the Southern United States to Patagonia, offered the most fertile soil for such fruit. The works featured in this program were selected from some of the most important musical archives in the Americas—from cathedrals in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, among others—in an attempt to provide an informal overview, a snapshot, of the wonders and origins of the music in Colonial Latin America.
Mestizaje could be viewed as the true silver and gold found across the Spanish Empire in the Americas. To underscore it in this manner, however, forces us to engage with aspects of the continent’s history that are profoundly traumatic. To paraphrase Geoff Baker, a preeminent figure in the field of Colonial music, one must not forget that when one speaks of Colonial Latin America, one speaks of colonizers and the colonized, of enslavement, oppression, and extreme suffering. In other words, one speaks of a cultural interaction that was hardly between equal parties. Obviously, music and its production in Colonial Latin America were no exception.
One of the works featured in this program, A la mar me llevan, perfectly illustrates the complexity of this cultural interaction. Written down by Spanish bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, this anonymous “composition” presumably depicts music the bishop heard during his travels through the Trujillo diocese in Peru, sometime in the early 1780s. It contrasts a mournful text, about a man taken from his native Congo to become a slave, with a melody that is, for lack of a better expression, an invitation to sing and dance. From a 21st-century perspective, how are we to understand such a contradiction? An imperfect response would be that cultural and racial stereotypes were common in sixteenth-century arts and literature in Western Europe (as also reflected, for instance, in the parodies of Italian commedia dell’arte), so the invitation to dance in the song’s poetry and music may be a manifestation of these stereotypes. A more nuanced answer would point to the ideas put forth by writers such as the American Frederick Douglass (again, cited by Baker), a former slave turned abolitionist who, in 1845, expressed dismay at the idea that the song of a captive slave could ever express anything other than the sorrows of the heart. Yet a third response is to remember that the presence of an odd rhythm here, an unusual melody there, or a line of poetry expressing an idea incomprehensible to a modern, fine-tuned reader, does not necessarily mean that a given piece is an actual portrait of eighteenth-century indigenous, black, or mestizo culture, but rather that these elements may have found their way into a musical practice that was principally rooted in Spanish institutions and performance practices. Throughout this program the audience will encounter several such instances.
What does this mean to us today? As performers, we are proposing a dialogue with the realities of colonial history, a conversation that moves away from simply presenting this music as an “exotic” form of early music, and one that aims to be as sensitive to the beauty of the repertoire as it is to its more complicated historical issues. As listeners, you are invited to admire the splendor, power, and liveliness of these works without losing sight of the complexities and contradictions that inhabit the historical picture of colonial culture.
Funders
